Archive for August, 2005

Nasa has turned the Hubble Space Telescope to point at the moon to begin lookig for a suitable site to build a ‘Moon Base’.

What Nasa is looking for are sites with a good supply of ilmenite, a mineral from which to extract oxygen, hydrogen and helium. As well as producing air and water, the flammable gases could be burned to generate electricity. Nasa scientists know to look for ilmenite, as it was found in soil samples brought back by the Apollo missions.

Nasa is looking to build a colony on the Moon as soon as 2018. I wonder if they will decide to build on my Lunar Plot? I wonder what rent I could charge!

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Two men, one in Morocco and one in Turkey, have been arrested over the unleashing of a computer worm that affected US firms earlier this month.
Moroccan authorities detained Farid Essebar, 18, while Atilla Ekici, 21, was arrested by Turkish authorities on Thursday, the FBI said.

They are believed to be responsible for the Zotob worm that targeted computers using Microsoft operating systems.

More than 100 firms were affected including CNN and The New York Times.

He said the two men would face prosecution in their native countries with FBI officials providing evidence.

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Discovery has been successfully de-mated from Nasa’s specially modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and has now been towed into the Orbiter Processing Facility bay 3 where the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, still inside, will be removed from the payload bay and transferred to the Space Station Processing Facility.

What is interesting is that Nasa are now calling this latest mission a ‘Test Mission’. Previously it was called their ‘Return To Flight’ mission. Is this a damage limitation exercise?

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The shuttle Discovery has been delayed as it heads home to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center from Edwards Air Force Base in California.
The orbiter is riding piggyback on a modified jumbo jet, more than a week after it landed in the Mojave desert.

The pair arrived in Louisana on Friday for an overnight stop, but bad weather has delayed departure until Sunday.

The 3,591km (2,232 mile) trip is expected to cost the US space agency a hefty $1m (£560,000).

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Discovery has taken off from Edwards Air Force Base in Cailifornia. The shuttle is piggy-backed on a specially modified Boeing 747-100 Jumbo. The flight will be just 3 hours as the pair have to stop to refuel Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma and should continue on to Florida over night, weather permitting.

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The US Space Shuttle Discovery will leave NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California to begin its ferry flight home to Florida at sunrise this morning (about 1300BST).

Difficulties with alignment of the aerodynamic tailcone with the aft end of the Space Shuttle Discovery lead to the dealy of the departure.

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Nasa has announced that the shuttle fleet will remain grounded until March at the earliest,

Engineers are searching for a solution that will prevent foam being shed from the external tank and striking the orbiter during launch.

Seven members of an oversight panel also say Nasa’s latest shuttle efforts were tainted by some of the problems that caused the Columbia disaster.

Nasa didn’t look in detail at foam shedding from the tank for 113 flights – and shame on us
Dr Mike Griffin, Nasa administrator said.

“From an overall standpoint we think really March 4th is the time frame we are looking at,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa’s new head of space operations and the official overseeing the foam fix.

Nasa chief Michael Griffin told journalists at a press briefing in Washington that there had been complacency in the agency in the past. But that there was now a new culture at Nasa.

Space shuttle Atlantis was due to blast off in September. But Nasa engineers will now have to make modifications to the shuttle’s external fuel tank, particularly to an area known as the Protuberance Air Load (Pal) ramp.

Discovery will be used for STS-121 instead of Atlantis, putting NASA in a better position for future missions to the Space Station. Atlantis will fly the following mission, STS-115, carrying Space Station truss segments which are too heavy to be carried by Discovery. By changing the lineup, the program won’t have to fly back to back missions with Atlantis, as was previously scheduled.

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A war has broken out between hackers behind viruses that exploit a recently discovered loophole in Windows 2000.
The viruses written by the competing hacker groups are fighting it out for supremacy on infected machines.

Some of the variants seek out and delete rival viruses they find on machines they manage to penetrate.

The slew of malicious programs exploiting the loophole caused trouble for many organisations early this week as the bugs began infecting computers.

It is important that anyone using Windows 2000 patch their OS as soon as possible using Microsoft Update. The viruses exploit a weakness in the Plug-and-Play component of Windows 2000.